Daily Archives: September 17, 2021

We should not underestimate the crucial importance of leadership and design joining forces. Our global future depends on it. We will either design our way through the deadly challenges of this century, or we wont make it. For our institutionsin truth, for our civilizationto survive and prosper, we must solve extremely complex problems and cope with many bewildering dilemmas. We cannot assume that, following our present path, we will simply evolve toward a better world. But we can design that better world. That is why designers need to become leaders, and why leaders need to become designers.Richard Farson, Management by Design, 2000

The year was 1997. Looking back now, it seems like prehistoric times: pre-YouTube, pre-Facebook, 10 years before Apples launch of the iPhone. It was therein a conference room of one of my corporate clientsthat I first saw a publication titled Fast Company. That particular issue featured clever cover art mimicking the iconic Tide laundry detergent. As I inched over, I saw that the headline The Brand Called You took the place of the classic P&G nomenclature. I was intrigued. I riffled through to Tom Peterss cover story and read his declaration that a new construction of our corporate selves was required in the modern marketplace. As sexy as it seemed at the time, Im not sure anyone understood the gravity of Peterss proclamation. In hindsight, this became the entry point to living our lives publicly, punctuated with a constant barrage of personal pixels. And Fast Company had the scoop.

[Photo: Celine Grouard for Fast Company]By then the magazine was nearly two years old. I was newly minted in the branding business, and the first sentence of Peterss articleIts a new brand worldbecame my mantra. I adopted Fast Company as my business bible, as it identified and revealed the cultural concepts that have continued to define the zeitgeist. My growing knowledge was further influenced by another early Fast Company writer, Roger Martin, then dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. His pronouncement, Business people dont just need to understand designers betterthey need to become designers, became my rallying cry.

Its hard to imagine that Martin knew the extent to which business would ultimately embrace design, but 25 years later our entire culture is now immersed in a universe fueled by creativity. Behemoth corporations including P&G, Kraft, and Coca-Cola have shown us that scale alone is not nearly enough to thrive in a world where markets are rapidly globalizing and have proven that incremental improvement on its own cant deliver a robust return on investment. Companies, such as Apple, Nike, and Target, have proven that to succeed, prosper, and make a meaningful difference in todays world the most valuable contribution comes from using the designers foremost competitive weapon: innovation.

[Photo: Celine Grouard for Fast Company]We are living in a time where business skills and design skills have now converged in ways even Roger Martin couldnt have anticipated. And the stock market agrees: A Design Management Institute study showed that companies that put design at the core of their business strategy outperformed the market by a significant margin. Fifteen rigorously selected companies institutionally using design as a strategic tool beat the S&P by 228% from 2004 to 2014. And in 2018, McKinsey & Company reported that companies using design increased their revenues and total returns to shareholders substantially faster than industry counterparts that did not.

Now, if you are developing a marketing strategy, or streamlining a manufacturing operation, or building a new system for distributionif you work almost anywhere in the world of business todayyou must be engaged in the discipline of design. This bilingual ability has resulted in companies creating superior and elegantly refined products that not only taste different, feel different, and look different; these products are also attempting to make a difference in peoples lives.

[Photo: Celine Grouard for Fast Company]The biggest, boldest, most innovative products being created today come from companies that respond to compelling needs to redesign, improve, and change the way we livehow we travel, eat, enjoy music, or support causes we believe in. In addition, for the first time in our history as a modern civilization, design has become democratized. Motivated citizens are designing their own messages and creating brands to signify their beliefs. The Black Lives Matter movement, the Pussyhat Project, and the Extinction Rebellion are non-consumer-based initiatives to redesign society to reflect the type of world like-minded individuals want to live in. The condition of branding is beginning to reflect the condition of our culture.

[Photo: Celine Grouard for Fast Company]But it is still not enough. Democratized movements and superior products are beneficial but can only do so much. In order to survive and, more importantly, to thrive, the global economy must transform itself radically. Our institutions, organizations, and communities are facing complex challenges while coping with a global pandemic, climate crisis, blatant racism, financial volatility and inequality, and political unrest. We are facing a water shortage of epic proportions and unprecedented weather disruptions. Design and business must become inextricably linked to the way in which society, culture, the environment, and politics interact. The very fate of humanity is at stake. We can no longer assume that if we follow our present path, the world will simply evolve into a better place. The way toward that better place must be carefully considered and navigated by business leaders and designers alike. We must redesign the way we think, collaborate, and innovate. We must redesign the way we live and what we value.

This essay was excerpted from the book Fast Company Innovation by Design: Creative Ideas That Transform The Way We Live and Work on sale September 21. Pre-order a copy here.

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The most successful companies infuse their business with design. Now they need to think bigger - Fast Company

Today, the band is made up of McCrea, DiFiore, Roper, guitarist Xan McCurdy and bassist Daniel McCallum, who joined in 2016. As two of their biggest albums turn 25 and 20 -- Comfort Eagle was released July 24, 2001 -- respectively, the way that Cake carved out their own little quiet, anti-rock corner of the then-massive alt rock zeitgeist seems at risk of fading into obscurity. The consistency of their intimate, bright, familiar but not hackneyed sound and McCreas funny/sad lyrics allowed them to continue finding new audiences from the end of the grunge era through pop punks heyday. But they remained staunchly trend-averse enough that tying them into any broader narrative of 90s and early-aughts music is a challenge.

For McCrea, thats absolutely fine. In fact, its what he wanted: to make each song not just genre-less, but its own sort of solar system.

He remembers first feeling compelled to write songs as a Sacramento high schooler in the late 70s and early 80s, tinkering with verses he describes as inane and eventually learning enough guitar and bass to flesh out his ideas. At that point, McCrea had recently come across two artists that he describes as transformative: country legend Hank Williams, Sr. (Talking about minimalism, that shit is is just like a bullet) and big band titan Benny Goodman. In a way, they got me through a period of music that was wrong for me pretty unscathed, he explains.

Country, in particular, shaped McCreas sensibilities. Nobody that I take seriously as an artist can just discount country music, he says. I really loved archetypal, moving melodies that sometimes aren't all about originality, but about just communication of feeling -- I just fall for that sort of raw emotion.

McCrea sees the tension between that and his self-professed cynical, curmudgeonly, sarcastic tendencies; later, critics would sometimes only seem to hear the latter when they listened to Cakes music. To him, though, finding ways to include both of those leanings in one song is how he found his voice as a songwriter. For a lot of years, those things were kind of irreconcilable, he says. I sort of started finding a way to push them together, and allow them to coexist.

As he put it in 1996, A good song is like a teardrop in the eye of a prize-winning poodle at a world-class dog show. It doesnt matter what mood it is, as long as theres that tension, the pulling of opposites.

He moved to Los Angeles to try to make it as a songwriter, an effort that proved futile. I realized my songs weren't really one-size-fits-all enough, says McCrea. They were kind of weird and self-indulgent. When he eventually returned to Sacramento, he started waiting tables three days a week and writing songs during the other four, building up some of the library that would eventually become Cakes songbook.

Sacramento was a small enough city at that point that future bandmates crossed paths years before the genesis of Cake. Drummer Todd Roper was in a high school band with eventual Cake bassist Victor Damiani and original guitarist Greg Brown. Ropers drum teacher had negotiated a jam session for the high schooler with McCrea, then in his early twenties, that produced little besides a cassette tape. Roper brought the cassette to school and played it for his fellow music nerd friends; Brown, as he told the drummer later, was intrigued. Thats when his attraction to John started, says Roper. It was just like, Whoa, theres this songwriter in town

Brown and McCrea formed the creative core of Cake when the first iteration of the band came together in 1991. When I was working with [McCrea], I really felt the forward momentum, Brown recalls. I felt like, Something very creative is happening here. The rest of the group coalesced around their partnership.Greg and John have still, to this day a very powerful chemistry together, says Roper. I basked in the warmth that came off of that.

Getting together to listen to classic country and soul records, they brainstormed the concept for the band. We were definitely very conceptual about it, for some reason, Brown says. We were just like, Okay, we're not going with our gut -- we're gonna make something, and we're going to be intentional about it.

McCrea explained that he felt the common threads between those country and soul records should form the cornerstone of their sound, and he and Brown took notes on what specific elements they could pull from those vintage albums to support McCreas forcefully eclectic songs. A lot of times, it would sort of be filtered through Greg's ear, says McCrea. He would do things with his guitar that would sort of square things up rhythmically, in a way that I think was really, really, really smart.

It was mostly great. Sometimes difficult. Brown pauses. But I'm not going to talk about that. Mostly just a wonderful, creative kind of explosion of ideas, like a fountain that just never stopped flowing.

What Cakes members credit Brown for today, over two decades after he left the group, is helping consolidate that efficient, economical template thats made its music so recognizable. Every instrument was deliberately tinkered with, says Brown, as they searched for something that would be rhythmically compelling.

The arrangements that Greg created with John's songs stand to this day, almost note for note, says Roper. The sound was small, groovy and deliberate. Our aesthetic was one of limitations, as Brown puts it. And of course there was the trumpet, courtesy of DiFiore a particular rarity in a pre-ska-revival '90s alternative scene.

I happened to have been writing melodies for some of the songs that just sounded kind of bulbously heroic on the electric lead guitar, says McCrea. There's an emotional baggage to like, guy guitar hero stuff. I felt very strongly that we couldn't do that. But somehow when you put those same melodies on the trumpet, it cut through in the same way -- without taking up a lot of space.

Thus, Cake was born. Cake as in, to cake onto something not the tasty bakery staple, as they made clear from the start. ("It's just the sound of the word [that's appealing]," Brown told the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat in 1997. "And it's a short word that's easy to remember.") By the time they were ready to record their first single, Jolene (not a Dolly Parton cover) backed with Rock and Roll Lifestyle, in 1993, the group had established itself on the local scene, sharing bills with an array of nascent California acts including the Deftones and, memorably, Korn. Translating the sound they had refined over hours and hours of working on arrangement and then in small Sacramento clubs to disc, though, presented a new challenge.

Brown and McCrea wanted to recreate the warm sounds of the vinyl that had inspired them, almost as a reaction to the crystalline aesthetic of the CD era. They just had this cold glassy sound that we were turned off by, says Brown. With CDs, you would turn it up, and I would feel oppressed by it. With records, on the other hand, for the most part, I could turn the volume up all the way to 100 and still feel like I had space to think. Like it had breathing room.

Besides planning to literally release the single on vinyl as well as cassette, which was fairly unorthodox at the time, Brown pulled from Mark Lewisohns The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions to find sounds that were just sort of supple and inviting, yielding as opposed to aggressive a task that required he and McCrea to really work against the grain of the studio environment in the early 90s.

Part of it was by resisting the urge toward bigness and rock bluster, and having a drier approach to production and songwriting values, says McCrea. It was very difficult, in the beginning, to get sound engineers whether in the studio or live to turn things down, for Christ's sake.

That kind of scaling back and search for an intimacy of an older vintage was a self-conscious reaction to the excesses of rock to that point. It felt a little punk rock in the context of what was coming out of Seattle, says Roper. There was just a lot of really muscular grunge music sort of being foisted in people's heads, McCrea adds. What we did, within that context, felt pretty subversive. It was not without a little bit of hostility that we delivered our music product. People thought we were a joke, because we sounded small.

The initial impression of unseriousness might have been helped by their first taste of radio success with Rock n Roll Lifestyle, which made its way to college stations after their self-released debut, Motorcade of Generosity, was picked up by Capricorn Records in 1995. The track features McCreas spoken word indicting essentially all of his musical peers over a sinister riff, clarifying the bands aforementioned position as something of an alternative to the alternative. Excess aint rebellion, McCrea intones. Your self-destruction doesnt hurt them. It was certainly a fair critique, and one that resonated -- the song reached No. 31 on the Alternative Airplay chart.

It was really the first time anybody had noticed us, says McCrea. It set a sort of precedent, and I'm not sure if it was the right one -- the right first impression. But at the same time, I love the fact that I was able to communicate a critique of culture.

Though it didnt necessarily suggest the groups potential, those who listened to Motorcade in full heard a band that was already secure in its sound. If you listen to their first album, it is very much 'Cake,' says Simmons, who signed the band as a client after hearing the album. I think John McCrea is just an unbelievably wonderful songwriter. His songs are so simple and yet, they have this mysterious quality for me.

By the time the group went into the studio to record Fashion Nugget, they were veterans of the road, with a large catalog of songs that they had already refined. The group was characteristically methodical in the studio, and the band produced all its own music. Nobody was there to have a good time, says DiFiore, Everybody was there to make a good album. There was no yukking it up at all. But most of the trickiest decisions had already been made. The meat of The Distance, for example, was recorded in one take.

We played it once, and headed back to the control room to listen to the playback, says Roper. Greg's kind of bobbing his head, and he turns and he's like, Do you like the sound of the drums? I said, No, not really. Do you? He's like, Yeah, I totally did. I was like, You mean for keeps? And he was like, Yeah. I said, Well, it's your song. You can fucking keep it. And then I went to the coffee shop and got a bagel.

The song is one of very few Cake originals that McCrea didnt write himself. He took to it right away, and I didn't really understand what he saw in it so much, says Brown, who wrote the song, of McCrea. I liked the way it sounded and everything, but I thought Frank Sinatra was a much stronger choice for the single. But the record label chose it and it worked out.

Worked out might be an understatement. The surrealist Office Space-meets-vision quest video went into heavy rotation on MTV, and the song reached no. 4 on the Alternative Airplay chart, behind Bush, Sublime and No Doubt. Suddenly the bands DIY bona fides faded into the background as it moved from the college radio fringe to the epicenter of rock on the heels of another unorthodox track -- one that doesnt really begin to reflect the range uptempo funk, melancholy balladry and country twang on Fashion Nugget.

Critics were neither overwhelmingly positive nor disparaging, but words like ironic, goofy and detached were attached to the bands music with increasing frequency, especially when it came to the follow-up single, a cover of I Will Survive. It was broadly understood as what can only be described as a bit.

I don't think there's any irony in the way I deliver that song at all, says McCrea. The disco sucks movement was weirdly white supremacist, I think that's partially why everybody just assumed it must be a joke song. That's part of the damage of living in this country. We've got some baggage. (Fashion Nuggets other covers, Willie Nelsons Sad Songs And Waltzes and the pop vocal standard Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps, got less attention.)

They all fit in with the country and soul aesthetic that was kind of undergirding our overall sound, says Brown. If it was on our record, it was because [McCrea] just thought the song was the greatest thing in the world. Nothing we were ever doing was supposed to be that cute.

The band won sincere fans too, though -- fans that made it a very successful touring act not only in the wake of The Distance and the radio hits that followed, but right up to the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, almost a decade after their most recent album. But in the immediate wake of their evolution into an MTV-approved act, the pressure of their grueling schedule on the road took a toll on the band. McCrea was diagnosed with exhaustion; tour dates were cancelled.

It becomes really taxing, he says. You're mining for something that there's not very much of, and when you hit a vein of the gold and the quartz or whatever, you just keep going. Let's just rip up the mountain and get all this while we can. I did say no, as much as I could, but it was really an incredible amount of pressure from everybody.

Theres nothing particularly original about the story of fame and fortune putting a strain on creative and personal relationships. But as McCrea would say of the melodies of country songs, it can hit just as hard every time -- and the rapid transformation of Cake from Sacramento upstarts to international touring artists did just that.

The success of that song put such a strain on us personally, says Roper. We weren't strong enough between the five of us in a personal sense to hold it together, to survive the weight that was thrust onto us once the success began to arrive.

Brown and bassist Damiani left the band in 1997. I might have told you one thing back when I was 27 years old, and I left hot headed and mad about what I considered to be irreconcilable personality problems or whatever, says Brown. As 51-year-old me, I see a much larger context of what was going on in my life. Rather than get into all of it, I would just say there was a lot of turmoil at the time, and I felt like leaving Cake would be a decision that would be good for my health.

Because the band was in the middle of such a hot streak they were compelled to regroup almost immediately, bringing back bassist Gabe Nelson and hiring another local guitarist: Xan McCurdy, who is still in the band today. There's still a kind of kernel of Greg Brownness that I bring, whether it's intentional or not, says McCurdy. But there will never be anybody like Greg Brown. He is a total authentic original and a hardcore talent, and really built that group.

There are unintended consequences to becoming Cakes guitarist, though: I make jokes to my friends all the time, McCurdy adds. Like if I play in another band as a side thing I'm like, Look at this, I'm playing a chord! I haven't played a chord in six years.

In spite of the upheaval, Cake topped their initial burst of success with 1998s Prolonging The Magic and its lead single Never There -- both their biggest song to date (it was No. 1 on the Alternative Airplay chart), and probably the only major Cake single that allegations of unseriousness couldnt really stick to, given its a fairly straightforward song about longing. It was really a huge relief for me that the album didn't suck, that I could do it, says McCrea. Having established themselves as hitmakers, the group was signed by Columbia, a decision that came with more money and even more pressure.

There was some record company meddling in some of the decision making, McCrea says. It was a difficult interface between very New York, East Coast, sort of corporate culture and some weirdo home crafts project from Northern California. I think we could have used translators or something.

But it worked, again: 2001s Comfort Eagle, their first major label album, produced yet another Adult Top 40 and alternative radio hit with offbeat, call-and-response ode Short Skirt/Long Jacket and another collection of upbeat, deadpan, hyper-polished, genre-agnostic songs. It surprised me that it took off, says McCurdy of the single. It still does, honestly. I hear the na na nas, and I guess some people like the lyrics? They mostly just seem to like it in sort of a wacky way.

The crux of Cakes legacy lies in that paradox. Their most successful songs almost all fall at one end of their catalogs wide spectrum, the end with the most deadpan spoken word and lyrics that range from poetic to seeming almost free-associated. Short Skirt/Long Jacket, probably the least serious of all of them, helped cement that trend. I mean John keeps a tight grip on the creative side of things, so I'm sure he would have said, Absolutely not, if he didn't want Short Skirt to be the song that represented the group at that point, says McCurdy. But to me, it seemed a little like, Let's not f--k with the formula.

We didn't necessarily choose which songs got attention, says McCrea, but everything happened perfectly if that's what you wanted: to be misunderstood by baby boomers.

Cake released another album with Columbia, Pressure Chief, in 2004, whose prescient Luddite single No Phone reached no. 13 on the Alternative Airplay charts. Then they went dormant, leaving Columbia and relying on their draw as a touring act for the next half-decade. I felt like the whole music industry was somewhat wasteful, like a cruise ship or something, says McCrea. There was a lot of money being thrown at this industry selling a product that for most 19-year-olds was now free. So I just thought, Holy shit, we have to get off of this giant boat.

Going independent didnt hurt the band, though. Showroom of Compassion, recorded in their own solar-powered studio in Sacramento and released in 2011, was also their first no. 1 album on the Billboard 200 the lowest-selling No. 1 album in SoundScan history to that point, moving just 44,000 units, but No. 1 nevertheless -- and spawned one more alternative radio hit in the No. 4-peaking Sick of You. The realities of todays recorded music industry make releasing another Cake project less than appetizing, though theyve been writing and recording plenty in the decade since Showroom was released.

I just don't know if I'm willing to do all the hard work of making an album unless there's an equitable way of distributing it, McCrea says. I've been sort of curmudgeonly about my output. I still want to play music for my friends, but if we're talking about the economic situation, there's just something f--ked up about distribution right now.

But beyond their singles, which seem primed for a second life in TikTok challenges in the best way possible, Cake created an enviable, rich body of meaty songs and creative arrangements that stretched out what the alt 90s scene sounded like. If their stated ambition was a kind of reactive smallness, making music that sounded right on a well-worn record or a cozy club show, the scope of their aesthetic and topical curiosity and willingness to underpin almost all of their work with a critique of consumption was big. I don't know if we've influenced anybody, Brown says -- but the self-conscious rejection of genre and its attendant hierarchies have made Cakes early music sound, if not ahead of its time, than at least ageless.

They are still working together, albeit remotely, after being compelled to cancel tour dates at the beginning of the pandemic last year. McCurdy is in Portland; Roper, who returned to the band in 2016 after over a decade away, has moved to Muscle Shoals, Alabama; DiFiore is still in Sacramento. So is Brown, whose relationship with McCrea has long since been repaired. He's been actually helping me out on my projects, says Brown, who played with Damiani in the band Deathray until 2007, and still works on music as a soloist. We share ideas, and we have a really good relationship. I feel good about that, because I missed that creative energy that he and I had back in the day. I get a bit of that creative spark back.

McCrea lives with his family in Portland. When hes not writing more songs, he surreptitiously plants Western red cedar trees around Oregon a gesture towards environmental activism that he approaches with characteristic self-deprecation.

It's all self-indulgent, McCrea says. It's not going to lead to anything good. But it just feels good to do it, and so that's what I'm doing. If nothing else, it sounds like fuel for another great Cake song.

Continued here:

'Excess Ain't Rebellion': How Cake Has Made Moderation Sound Fun For the Past 30 Years - Billboard

The Impossibility of Equity

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Equity is a moving target. We who create architecture want our devotion to have a true forum of objective Equity. But motivations are not outcomes. How we judge design inevitably carries the baggage of Style and that makes universal equity in design apprehension impossible.

At this moment there are about as many women as men in architecture school. The story of two fully and fantastically successful architects, who happened to be female, says a lot about the impossibility of equity when it comes to how outcomes are perceived in architecture. Architecture is both popular trade and rarified fine art. Those two distinct worlds of judgment are often so separate as to offer zero possibility of equity between them. The two careers of these two women show how success in building and expression can be fully present in one sphere, while silent in the other.

I can compare these extraordinary humans because what I do enabled me to see them both before their bright light was shown to a wider world. I have written eight books and published the work of almost 100 architects. Rather than adopt stylistic screeds of either Modern or Traditional which absurdly try to define beauty, I included the great good work of those who were making the things I wrote about. Small houses, or additions, or other building types are the reason I write, not to polish any aesthetic lens.

In 1990, the book Common Walls/Private Homes written by John Nolon and me showed scores of multifamily projects across the country. In it, we featured an unbuilt housing project designed by Dale Mulfinger and Sarah Susanka. It was the first time Sarah Susankas work had been nationally published. In the intervening decade, Sarahs work exploded on the country, as she captured the zeitgeist of many in response to the insanity of a McMansion era of home marketing. Sarah Susanka wrote The Not So Big House.

The homes of her design shown in that and subsequent books were cleanly crafty, using natural wood, flowing space, and an essential domesticity of residential architecture. Susanka was featured multiple times on Oprah Winfreys television show and then on scores of other national media platforms. She lectured widely, wrote perhaps a dozen more books, even created a Not So Big Lifestyle movement. But the elite architectural press was near silent in celebrating her architecture. No equity of outcome between the Fine Arts world and the popular culture of glossy magazines at the supermarket check-out lines and cable TV where her work found infinite validation. There is no more well-known architect in America than Sarah Susanka.

In 1997, I wrote Expressive Details, featuring about forty architects whose work was shown in about sixty different details. Anne Fougerons work got my attention and she happily sent me two examples of it - tiny things that she was working on. In the next decade her work (as did Sarah Susankas) exploded, but Anne Fougeron was not on Oprahs TV show but rather she was featured in Architectural Record and Architecture magazines, exhibits and received unending AIA and other national awards and recognitions. Her leanly expressive beauty in building is the essence of a Modern sensibility. There is no more celebrated architect than Anne Fougeron.

Two extraordinary women created equity of outcome with all the rest of their peers. But their outcomes, in the same field, found distinct validation in fully separated worlds. Why? I think it is because the iniquitous apprehension of Style categorizes all design, without merit beyond the comfort of controlling definition. There is no equity in segregation.

Beauty is the soul of equity. How we react to everything, including the things that are designed, does not have the luxury of having a universal equity in outcome. We are either moved by the outcomes of others, or we are not. Rather than simply react to the beauty of Susankas craft or Fougerons lines, their buildings are judged Traditional or Modern. Consigned to a separate, but never equal, duality of judgment.

I wish Sarah Susankas architecture was a feature in Architectural Record Record Houses. I wish that Anne Fougerons work as a focus of Fine Homebuildings HOUSES issue. I have had features in both, when there was a tiny touch of aesthetic equity in architectural recognition. But no more. The irony of a lack of equity in their aesthetic outcomes belies the joy found in their human equity in the profession of architecture.

This article is part of the ArchDaily Topic: Equity. Every month we explore a topic in-depth through articles, interviews, news, and projects. Learn more about our monthly topics. As always, at ArchDaily we welcome the contributions of our readers; if you want to submit an article or project, contact us.

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The Impossibility of Equity - ArchDaily

Do you know someone who believes in QAnon? Are you afraid of QAnon? Have you been wondering where it comes from and what it even means?

Join us as todays guest explains how seemingly normal, intelligent, sane people believe in lizard people, pedophile cabals, and micro-chipped trackers delivered via vaccines.

Dr. Sophia Moskalenko

Sophia Moskalenko is a social and clinical psychologist studying mass identity and conspiracy theories at the Georgia State Universitys Evidence-Based Cyber Security group. Dr. Moskalenkos research on psychology of radicalization and terrorism has been presented in scientific conferences, government briefings, radio broadcasts and international television newscasts. As a research fellow at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (NC-START) she has led research projects commissioned by the Department of Defense, Department of Energy, Department of Homeland Security, and Department of State. She has written several books, including award-winning Friction: How conflict radicalizes them and us, The Marvel of Martyrdom: The power of self-sacrifice in the selfish world, and Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the mind of QAnon.

Gabe Howard

Gabe Howard is an award-winning writer and speaker who lives with bipolar disorder. He is the author of the popular book, Mental Illness is an Asshole and other Observations, available from Amazon; signed copies are also available directly from the author.

To learn more about Gabe, please visit his website, gabehoward.com.

Producers Note: Please be mindful that this transcript has been computer generated and therefore may contain inaccuracies and grammar errors. Thank you.

Announcer: Youre listening to Inside Mental Health: A Psych Central Podcast where experts share experiences and the latest thinking on mental health and psychology. Heres your host, Gabe Howard.

Gabe Howard: Im your host, Gabe Howard, and I want to quickly thank our sponsor, Better Help. You can grab a week free by visiting BetterHelp.com/PsychCentral. Calling in to our show today. We have Sophia Moskalenko. Dr. Moskalenko is a social and clinical psychologist studying mass identity and conspiracy theories at the Georgia State Universitys Evidence-Based Cybersecurity Group. She is also the author of Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon. Dr. Moskalenko, welcome to the show.

Sophia Moskalenko, Ph.D.: Thank you so much for having me.

Gabe Howard: The QAnon conspiracy is everywhere. Weve heard it from the Senate floor, from the presidential pulpit, for Petes sake. Its literally been mentioned at the highest levels of government all the way down to seedy social media platform chat rooms. But what exactly is it? What is QAnon?

Sophia Moskalenko, Ph.D.: QAnon is a baseless and debunked conspiracy theory, or rather its a whole lot of different conspiracy theories under one umbrella, and they range from things like flat earth and lizard people, the idea that there are these lizard human hybrids living among us to the belief that a Satan worshiping cabal of pedophiles has taken over the control of the American government and the media. It, of course, also includes all kinds of beliefs about the COVID virus and the vaccine being either poison or something that can turn your child into LGBTQ or something that carries a micro tracking device. So there are all kinds of different conspiracy theories that all fall under the QAnon umbrella. Its really like an Amazon of conspiracy theories. Theres something there for everyone.

Gabe Howard: When I first heard about QAnon, I thought it was a group. Is it a structured group? Is there a leadership, a membership? Can you join it or is it literally just a collection of nonsense?

Sophia Moskalenko, Ph.D.: Right. There is no leadership to speak of. Initially, QAnon begun with these Q drops, these cryptic pieces of information that appeared on Chans, this like lesser used social media sites that people interpreted as though they were puzzles. And theres a lot of controversy about who the poster was for these original Q drops, who the Q so to speak was, that HBO did a documentary. And at the end, they couldnt really say definitively, but they thought it probably was more than one person posting. By today, QAnon following counts in tens of millions in the US alone, and it has spread around the world to dozens of countries. Its a very loose following. Its not like there are weekly meetings or there are some check points you need to pass in order to get to the QAnon Shangri-La. You too can go online and check out the influencers who spread QAnon content and click by click, you will end up down the rabbit hole, as they call it, where all kinds of theories are formulated and augmented and discussed about how the world really, really works. What are the secret ins and outs of how the economy is controlled and who runs the world government and who are in the cabal and so on.

Gabe Howard: Some people believe that QAnon is a cult. Some people believe that its a religion and theres yet another group of people that are like, no, no, no, its just a political movement. Im having trouble understanding exactly what it is because its so fanciful. I mean, lizard people have taken over our government? I dont understand how this gained any traction, let alone millions of followers. But for the purpose of understanding this phenomenon is QAnon a cult, is it a religion? Is it a political movement? Does it have a name?

Sophia Moskalenko, Ph.D.: Is QAnon a cult? To the best of my knowledge, of what a cult is, it usually is a pretty tight-knit face-to-face group with a very specific leadership and very specific rules for belonging and for leading. QAnon is not face-to-face, people interact with other QAnon followers through the Internet. They usually dont know them. They are not compelled to exchange their addresses and names and phone numbers and so on. There is no central leadership. Were hard pressed to even find out who the original Q drops came from. And its a really broad group. It doesnt really seem to satisfy the definition of a cult, in my opinion. Is it a religion? I am a little rusty on what defines religion, but it seems to me there has to be a central tenet or belief. And as I mentioned, QAnon is such a broad set of beliefs. And a lot of people who are QAnon followers believe some, but not others, often kind of squabble with each other online. There are these QAnon followers who sneer at those who believe in lizard people, and there are those who believe the space lasers and maybe some other QAnon followers dont. It doesnt seem like its like a religion either, because theres no central tenet as far as their beliefs are concerned.

Sophia Moskalenko, Ph.D.: So what really is it? How should we think about it? In my work on case studies that Ive analyzed for the book, really in-depth analysis of dozens of QAnon followers social media output, their own writings, their posts of videos and interviews they gave, and also looking at some of the research data that my colleagues are now putting out. It seems to me, this is my professional but personal opinion, that QAnon is kind of a zeitgeist. Its a refuge for people who feel like the society is leaving them behind. They share a number of grievances about the government, about how our country is run, the institutions that are in charge of their lives. They share a deep mistrust about science that permeates their daily lives from the food they eat, that has pesticides and hormones and all of that. And the medicines they take and the computers they use, all of the science in their lives, is giving them a lot of anxiety and uncertainty. And the most general thing that we can say about QAnon, I believe, is that its an escape route for those among us who dont feel comfortable or respected or welcomed in the society as it is right now.

Gabe Howard: But theyve turned violent. Its my understanding that the majority of the rioters at the U.S. Capitol on January 6 were QAnon believers. Isnt that concerning? I mean, tens of millions of people that are defending their beliefs with violence. Its frightening.

Sophia Moskalenko, Ph.D.: It would be frightening if it were true. The majority of people who stormed the Capitol Hill building on January 6, in fact, were not QAnon follower. How many were QAnon followers? Well, as of about a month ago, I believe the number was 61 people indicted for participation in the January 6 riot were indeed QAnon followers. Sixty-one is a very small proportion of everyone who was at the January 6 event in the Capitol Hill. So why is there this pretty widespread perception that QAnon was the driving force of that riot? I think one answer is that they just really stood out. That shaman, with the horns and the naked tattoo-covered torso. Some people who wore really bright clothing that featured large letter Q on it, some people with flags. And also the fact that the two women who were killed at the event, Ashli Babbitt, who was shot when she tried to climb a barricade that led to the door behind which the lawmakers escaped, and another woman who was trampled to death on the stairs were both QAnon supporters. So its kind of a availability heuristic that were using when were trying to imagine the crowd on January 6. Because the most visible, the most widely reported as far as the two women who were dead were indeed QAnon followers.

Sophia Moskalenko, Ph.D.: But in fact, they were a minority at that event. There is indeed a number of QAnon followers who did engage in ideologically motivated crime, including storming the Capitol Hill building. But relative to their population of tens of millions, its a tiny proportion. So QAnon is a set of shared radical beliefs. But as far as radical action is concerned, we probably shouldnt spend too much time worrying about them engaging in it. They are dangerous, though, in a different way.

Gabe Howard: Im very glad to hear that theyre not dangerous in the sense of theyre not trying to overthrow the government. Theyre not participating in violence. But you said they are dangerous. What? How are they dangerous if theyre not dangerous?

Sophia Moskalenko, Ph.D.: Well, theyre not dangerous in a terrorist threat kind of way, but think for a second how big a section of our society believes in QAnon conspiracy theories. Right? This is the same subset of our population who dont believe in our institutions and our governments authority. They dont follow government recommendations. So we already are carrying the costs of this behavior in, for example, rates of vaccination, which we know are correlated with QAnon beliefs. So people who believe QAnon conspiracy theories are a lot less likely to become vaccinated or ever intend to do so. And of course, therefore, their chances of getting sick with COVID and then ending up in a hospital seriously ill and putting pressure on our health care system are a lot higher. They may not participate in elections at the same rate, or they may participate in elections in a way that undermines them, preventing people from voting or intimidating people or discouraging them in other ways.

Gabe Howard: One of the things that I think about is that this is America. Were free to believe whatever we want, you know, freedom, of course, is the right to be wrong. Now, youve listed a lot of reasons why we should, in fact, worry about them. But where do we draw the line on this? It gets really messy quickly, right? We cant stop people from believing incorrect things. Thats not the way America works. But youve described real damage. Whats the path forward?

Sophia Moskalenko, Ph.D.: Right. We cant stop people from believing things, but at the same time, we can make sure that information on which they base their beliefs is at least somewhat balanced. We can make sure that the social media, which are the new public squares basically, they are the new media. A lot of people get their news completely from the social media. They can be fair players in this game and become more transparent about whats happening on their platforms, become a little more diligent about malicious players, whether those are domestic or foreign. We know for a fact that Russia was from the onset very much playing into spreading QAnon, multiplying QAnon content through trolls and bots and Kremlin backed media, because it is in their geopolitical interest to sow this division among the American public, which then results in the kinds of events like the January 6 storming of Capitol Hill. We need regulations for that. And we need legislation that will help to identify malicious players and those who spread harmful content so that people can make decisions based on facts than just what the algorithms of Facebook or YouTube or Twitter put in front of their eyes.

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Gabe Howard: Lets talk about turning loved ones away from QAnon. Is there any way to get through to them and bring them back to reality? Because just saying, hey, youre wrong. Here are the facts, doesnt seem to be working.

Sophia Moskalenko, Ph.D.: Yeah, in fact, its exactly the wrong thing to say, because we know from research that trying to argue with somebody about their beliefs is likely to make them even more entrenched in them. People become defensive and, in their head, even after you have finished talking with them, they will keep coming up with reasons for why they were right and you were wrong. And so a few days later, if you ask them about their beliefs, theyre going to be even more convinced of them than they were before you tried showing them the light, so to speak. So definitely dont argue with QAnon followers about facts. So what can we do? One thing that we can do that is not easy but really important is to not cut these people out of our lives and of our social circles. A really big reason why people joined QAnon or stayed with it was the social connection, especially during the COVID lockdown. The rates of QAnon following just skyrocketed because people were so lonely and so isolated in their homes, they were looking to share their emotions and their fears and QAnon offered that to them. If they could relate to people outside of QAnon not on the basis of their beliefs, but just on the basis of emotional connection. If its family, then you probably have some shared past or common loved ones, that will go a long way toward driving a wedge between them and this crazy online world.

Gabe Howard: Theres this part of me that just thinks that anybody that believes this has to be not intelligent, they have to be just extraordinarily naive or they have to be mentally ill. Is there a link there? Are intelligent people falling for this?

Sophia Moskalenko, Ph.D.: Youre not alone in that assumption or suspicion, people have expressed that a lot, even people in Washington suggested that. My own research doesnt show that intelligence is a correlate of QAnon beliefs. In other words, it doesnt seem to matter how intelligent a person is if you want to predict whether or not they will follow QAnon. So, among the QAnon followers that I researched, there were Harvard graduates, attorneys, physicians, successful small business owners, as well as high school dropouts, people of all ages, different economic backgrounds. We may get better data later, but at least for now, thats what it looks like. Mental illness, on the other hand, does seem to be much more prevalent among QAnon followers than it is in the general population.

Sophia Moskalenko, Ph.D.: Its hard to tell whether mental health problems are the cause of following QAnon, so people who are mentally unwell are more likely to seek out QAnon, or maybe following QAnon exacerbates dormant mental health problems. Or maybe theres something else that is driving both, but there is definitely a connection between the two. I am currently collecting data from, as you say, people who are sitting at home in front of their computers and asking them also about their history of mental health issues. So I will have an answer to that in a couple of months, I hope.

Gabe Howard: I love that the research is continuing on this. It really seems like QAnon took off when the former president started espousing the beliefs, so it gave it some legitimacy. Do you think that we will see this sort of die down as more polarizing political figures are in our rear view?

Sophia Moskalenko, Ph.D.: I wish the more polarizing political figures were in our rear view, but we have two congresswomen who are avid QAnon supporters and disseminators, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert. And we have dozens of political candidates running in the primary who are also unabashedly QAnon supporters. And it seems like its not costing them any votes or any sponsors money. In fact, it seems like it helps them get elected. So unfortunately, I dont think were going to see QAnon kind of dying out of President Trump is, as you say, in our rear view mirror. Unfortunately, I think President Trump is not entirely in our rear view mirror.

Gabe Howard: I think that youre absolutely correct. This is dominating the news cycle. I mean, its a popular enough theory that a mental health podcast is covering it from a mental health perspective. This is not some small fringe thing. Do you think something thats giving it legs is the fact that its constantly being discussed in the media?

Sophia Moskalenko, Ph.D.: Are you proposing a conspiracy theory, Gabe?

Gabe Howard: I, its I struggle with this so much because I just I honestly believe that if you walked up to any QAnon follower and you said to them, Im a reptilian and I live under the flat earth, they would immediately call you a liar. Yet they believe that its out there. Its a dichotomy that confuses me completely, understanding that I am not a mental health professional. I am not a researcher. I am just a gentleman with bipolar who hosts a podcast and gets to talk to great researchers and doctors like you. But the, it fascinates me. And I just dont have the words to describe how anybody can fall for this.

Sophia Moskalenko, Ph.D.: I think its fair to assume that there is a number of QAnon followers who dont believe much or any of it. And for them, engaging in QAnon talk online or in-person is just a collective narrative making to vent their frustrations, to relate to people of similar political leanings. And if you put them against the wall and, you know, really interrogated them, they would say they didnt really believe any of it. For them, its just a kind of posturing. And then theres some for whom its really true. And those people, unfortunately, are probably deeply unwell. And we need to be thinking about how to provide them with mental health services that theyre not getting at the moment. And then there are a lot of people in the middle who are, like you said, you know, if you told them that you were a lizard hybrid, they would probably laugh in your face. But at the same time, they have to deal with so much on a daily basis that they have no way of ascertaining. And so they just have to take somebodys word on it. Im buying processed food at a store, and I just have to trust the manufacturing company to actually put food into it that they say they did, and occasionally turns out that they didnt do that. Same with medicine I buy for my children. You know, I just have to trust the scientist who put out research about it to be truthful instead of greedy. And occasionally it turns out they were not truthful. So people often develop this deep skepticism and suspicions of the most fundamental daily things that come from science, that come from government, and that are critically important in their lives. And so they treat everything with the same skepticism and allow for the possibility that theres poison in the food and drugs that will make you into a drug addict, even though theyre supposed to help you. And doctors who will push those drugs on you in order to get rich and that there are lizard people living out there.

Gabe Howard: Dr. Moskalenko, I can only imagine what your research is like. It had to be both fascinating and scary because Im equal parts fascinated and terrified. Do you have any final words on this phenomenon? Is this the first time that something like this to this scale has gripped America? Are we in uncharted waters here or is this just more of the same?

Sophia Moskalenko, Ph.D.: Conspiracy theories are definitely not new. In fact, most of QAnon folklore is a reiteration of some old conspiracy theory. Like, for example, the Protocols of Zion, which came out of Czarist Russia in the 18th century and claimed that a cabal of Jews were kidnapping children and worshiping Satan and drinking their blood and torturing them. So that part is not really new or surprising. What is new, though, is how far-reaching its gotten with the help of social media. Were so intimately connected through our devices all the time now. Before it would take some time and effort to get some pamphlets somewhere and read it. And the scarcity of paper and the expense of printing would make the spread of these stories much less. Now its just spreading like wildfire.

Gabe Howard: Its hard enough to move forward when everybody is using actual data, because even in science, we see different interpretations of facts. But when youre not bound by truth, everything is game. And its utterly terrifying to think that there are tens of millions of people that believe some of these things. So thank you so much for your research and your book, Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon. Where can folks find that?

Sophia Moskalenko, Ph.D.: Its on sale at Amazon and Barnes & Noble, or you can buy it directly from Stanford University Press.

Gabe Howard: Well, thank you so much for being here.

Sophia Moskalenko, Ph.D.: Thank you for having me.

Gabe Howard: And thank you to all of our listeners. My name is Gabe Howard and I am the author of Mental Illness Is an Asshole and Other Observations. And Im also a nationally recognized public speaker. And I would love to be at your next event. You can grab a signed copy of my book with free swag or learn more about me just by heading over to gabehoward.com. Wherever you downloaded this podcast, please follow or subscribe. Its absolutely free. And you wont miss a thing. Also, take a moment and review the show. And Ill see everybody next Thursday on Inside Mental Health.

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Podcast: Unraveling the QAnon Conspiracy Theory - PsychCentral.com